Water Rendering in Far Cry 5

Explore the innovative water rendering system developed for Far Cry 5 in this 49-minute GDC session from 2018. Dive into the technical details as AMD's Cristian Cutocheras and Ubisoft's Branislav Grujic reveal the all-new water system that enables artists to create realistic water-based physical features like waterfalls and lakes. Learn about the engine, tools, and rendering techniques used, including material structure buffers, tessellation, normal mapping, smoothness, foam generation, and flow mapping. Discover how the team tackled challenges such as material blending in half precision, minimum precision basics, and register pressure optimization. Gain insights into performance improvements and problem-solving approaches used in the development process.

Intro
Agenda
Tech Overview
Engine
Tools
Rendering
Material Structure Buffer
Tessellation
Normal
Smoothness
Foam
Flow Map
Composite
Material blending in half precision
Minimum precision basics
Precision lowering cannot be automatic
Register pressure is a common bottleneck
Main source of register pressure
Live register analysis
Half precision counters allocation overhead
Problems
Dampen Edge
Performance (ms)
FarCry Talks